The Fire Sermon (27 page)

Kip and I looked at each other. I spoke first.

“You think I had it easy? I was sent away, a bit later than most, but sent away nonetheless. And I’ve had experience of raiding parties. Maybe not those that you organize, but I know what it’s like to have them come for you, to be snatched away.”

“You don’t agree with our methods. We’ll have more time to talk about these things. But it’s your story I need to know about for now. And yours,” he added, turning to Kip. “Look.” He reached across the small table. With a single finger he lifted my hair from my forehead, traced my brand. “You can say what you like about understanding the Omega experience, but your experience
was
different. The brand is made for infants, toddlers at the oldest. But your scar has hardly stretched, barely faded. You must have been nearly grown when this was done.”

I reached up and brushed his hand from my forehead, but his gaze remained fixed on my eyes.

“Thirteen. Then they sent me away.”

He smiled again. “Thirteen? It’s not unheard of for seers to conceal their nature for a while—years, even—but I’ve never heard of any lasting that long. Quite an achievement: the girl who had everyone fooled.”

“Not everyone,” I said, thinking of Zach, his watchfulness.

Piper turned suddenly to face Kip. “And you—how did you manage it?”

“Manage what?”

Piper reached out, this time to touch Kip’s brand.

“To avoid branding for so long. You’re not a seer. It’s a bit harder for you and me to hide.” He shrugged his left shoulder, glancing conspiratorially at Kip’s own empty sleeve. “So what I’m wondering is, how does somebody like you manage to avoid branding for half his life?”

My hand went to my own brand; next to me Kip mirrored my movement. I turned to him, giving a sound that was partly a laugh, partly a groan.

“All that time,” I said. “All that time sitting there, every night, trying to dredge up some clue about your past. And it’s there, in the middle of your head. We’re idiots.”

“Speak for yourself. You’re meant to be the seer, after all.” Despite his joking tone, his hand didn’t shift from his forehead. I wondered if he was remembering the same moment I was: that night shortly after our escape from Wyndham, when I’d woken, frantic, from a dream of the Confessor, and Kip had grabbed me.
It’s all right, shhhh, it’s all right,
he’d said, and I’d pressed my forehead against his. I could still feel it, the neat match of his scar against mine. The same size.

“It’s not much to go on,” Kip said, “but it’s not normal, right? So we should be able to work out something. Maybe they—”

Piper interrupted. “It seems you know as little about your past as I do. Even less, possibly.”

Kip met Piper’s eyes. “My past began a few months ago, when I saw Cass.” Before Piper could finish the eye roll he’d begun, Kip went on: “I’m not being sentimental. That’s literally when my memories begin. Before that—nothing, other than a few vague memories of the tanks themselves.”

It took us a long time to tell him: the Keeping Rooms, the tank room, our journey. I was eager to spread the word of what I’d seen in the tank rooms, but also hesitant about just how much to reveal of my past. Kip and I kept interrupting each other, then stumbling into silence whenever the conversation approached the identity of my twin. In the end I omitted all mention of Zach but kept nothing else back. Piper asked us to draw maps, diagrams, of the chamber, the equipment, the light in my cell, the route we followed after our escape. I was worried that Kip would be uncomfortable as I described the wires and vats of the tank room, but he seemed excited to be telling someone his story, nodding confirmation as I described various details.

I told him about the Confessor, but it was clear that he’d already heard of her. “She’s a formidable character, by all accounts. I wish we could have got to her before the Council did.”

“Trust me,” I said. “You wouldn’t want her on your side.”

“Perhaps not. But I’m not sure I want her on theirs, either—that’s the problem.”

I told him about the moment I’d tried to fight back and had snatched a glimpse inside her own mind. The huge chamber, bedecked with wires, that I’d seen there, and her furious response.

“It wasn’t some other part of the tank room?”

“No. Completely different.” I pictured it again—the sinuous climbing of the wires around the metal casings and up the curved walls. It wasn’t only that the chamber had looked unlike anything else I’d seen. It was the rage of her response, dagger-fast and sharp. Whatever it was that I’d seen, it was important to her.

When we reached our escape from New Hobart, and told him about the hanging cage outside the marsh settlement, he only nodded.

“You’re not surprised?” Kip demanded.

“I wish I were. One of our own ships returned two days ago, with the same news.”

“They’d been to the same settlement?” It seemed an unlikely coincidence, given the vast expanse of marshland, where the only people we’d glimpsed had been the mounted soldiers.

Piper shook his head. “No. Our scouts had been north of New Hobart.” Nausea blossomed in me as he paused. I knew what was coming. “Two settlements there, and another closer to the coast. Soldiers rode through there as well. One person was whipped at each. They didn’t even bother to trump up charges as they usually do—just checked their registration cards, to make sure they weren’t twinned with anyone important. Then whipped them, and made sure they were displayed for all to see.”

He must have seen the horror in our faces.

“It might have been intended for you,” he said bluntly. “I’m not going to offer you any false comfort. But reports reached us, too, of an uprising in New Hobart, after the Council began to seal the town.” I thought of Elsa, and Nina. “It didn’t amount to much—nothing more than stones thrown, and marching and shouting—but even that kind of thing is unprecedented. There are lots of reasons why the Council might be trying to make an example of people right now.”

I pictured the small settlement where Kip and I had sneaked close to the barn and danced to the bards’ music. Did a cage now swing from a gibbet there as well? I was too aware of the blood in my veins. It dragged like gravel. I wanted to reach for Kip’s hand, but even the consolation of touch was more than I was able to grant myself. There was horror in Kip’s face that I’d never seen before, not even as we sprinted from the fire, or battled the encroaching water of the reef.

Only after Piper prompted us were we able to continue. I could hardly hear my own words. I felt as though I were speaking over the sound of the gibbet’s chain, creaking in my mind.

Piper was particularly attentive when we described our journey to the island. When we told him it had taken us two nights and two days, he’d nodded. “Longer than usual, then, by a good twenty hours. But that’s for experienced sailors, on the most direct route from the mainland and through the reef. And we’d never make the crossing in a boat so small.”

He asked me to try drawing a map, but after several false starts I pushed the paper away. “I can’t see it that way—it doesn’t just come like that.”

“Try again. You made the journey recently, you must remember it.” Piper pushed the paper back across the table toward me.

Kip placed his hand firmly on the paper. “Enough—give it a rest. You have maps, anyway—your people must have.”

“Of course,” said Piper. “We have maps, though we guard them carefully. But no one ever made it here without one. Not even the seers. We’ve had two on the island, but they were brought here. Neither found their own way.”

“Lucky me,” I said. “I made it all this way, only to be interrogated again.”

Piper didn’t acknowledge the anger in my voice, though he did reach out and draw the paper back toward him. “You two need to understand. Our location is the one thing that protects this island. They’ve known for a long time that we have a stronghold somewhere. Our rescues have been concentrated largely in the west, because that’s what we can access most easily—so the Council must know we’re off the west coast. But that’s more than six hundred miles of coastline. What Cass has told me, about the Confessor, suggests they’ve narrowed it down. But the distance, the reef, the crater, they’re our main defenses. No one sets foot on this island who hasn’t been brought here. Until you.”

Kip stood up. “So you think we’re a threat?”

Piper stood up, too, but only to walk over to the cabinet on the side wall and retrieve a key that hung beneath the mirror.

“No. I think you’re a gift. I think you may be the most powerful weapon we have.” He was looking at me now. “I have to go, to talk to the Assembly, tell them what you’ve told me. We’ll talk again soon. For now, take this.” He handed me the key. “It’s the gate to the fort. My guards will show you to your lodgings.” He turned to Kip, reached out his arm. They shook hands. Despite the difference in their sizes, I was struck by the symmetry of the movement.

On the way out, I paused at the door. “Your predecessor—the fancy-chair guy. What happened to him?”

Piper looked straight at me. “I killed him. He was a traitor—charging refugees money for safe harbor here. Planning to betray the island to Alphas.”

“And his twin?”

This time Piper didn’t even lift his gaze from the maps laid out on the table before him. “I killed her, too, I suppose.”

chapter 19

The next morning, as we finished the bread that had been brought to us for breakfast, a watchwoman leaned into the open door of our room. “Piper wants you in the Assembly Hall.” But when Kip and I both headed for the door, she spoke again. “Only her.”

The large hall, nearly empty the previous day, was busy now. Rumors of our arrival had obviously spread; as I made my way through the clusters of people, some pointed, while others just stared. I caught snatches of their not-quite-whispered conversations:
found us herself—seer—no map—so she claims
.

I found Piper at the same table as before. He waved away the woman he’d been speaking to and ushered me to sit.

There were no preliminaries. “The tanks,” he said. “How could it work? How can the Council members keep their Omega twins unconscious, and keep functioning themselves?”

“They’re not unconscious. Not the way somebody is after a blow to the head.” I struggled to make words fit what I’d witnessed in the tank room. The liminal state that those people had occupied. “Somehow the Council’s found a way, using the machines, to keep them in a suspended state. Not sleep, but not death, either. I think that’s what was so awful about the place. Worse than death, because of the way they’re still there in some way. Stuck.”

I couldn’t explain it properly. A few times, diving for mussels in the river with Zach, I’d dived too deep, or stayed too long wrestling a stubborn mussel from a rock. That moment, swimming for the surface, when you realize you’re almost out of air, and the light above seems impossibly far away, was where the tanked bodies were trapped. In the tanks, the limbo of that moment was drawn out forever. And I remembered what Zach had said to me, on one of the nights when Mom and Dad were arguing about us downstairs:
You’re the problem, Cass. You’re the reason we’re stuck in this limbo.

When Piper spoke again, I was glad to have my thoughts of Zach interrupted. It felt safer to keep Zach out of my mind, tucked away where our link could not be exposed. If Piper found out who my twin was, I knew it could be used against me.

“But apart from Kip, you didn’t see any movements?” he asked. “Any sign of consciousness?”

“A few had their eyes open,” I said. “But he was the only one who was alert. His eyes moved. But I could feel the others—all of them.”

“If what you’re saying is true—”

“It is.”

He leaned back in his chair. He didn’t disguise the fact that he was appraising me, his brown eyes scanning my face intently. “Yes,” he said eventually. “I think it is. Then it confirms our worst fears about the Council, and what they’re willing to do.”

“I’m sorry.”

He smiled, the lines at the outer edges of his eyes deepening. His face slipped easily into happiness, like a waterbird launching onto a lake. Even midsmile, however, he was purposeful.

“Sorry because you bring bad news? Or sorry because your twin is involved?”

I looked away, but his gaze didn’t budge. Eventually I turned back to face him.

“You still haven’t asked me who he is.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Would you tell me if I did?”

“No.”

“Exactly. I’m not in the habit of wasting my time.” He wasn’t menacing, only matter-of-fact. He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “We know he’s in the Council. We know you’re afraid to tell us who he is. We will find out.”

Where I might have expected anger, again I felt only exhaustion. Even here, on the island that had occupied my dreams for years, Zach could still jeopardize everything.

“We came here seeking shelter,” I said. “Just like all the other Omegas who come here. Shouldn’t this island be the one place where my twin can’t be used against me?”

“I wish it could be,” said Piper. I looked at his face, and I believed him. “But you changed the island, the moment you arrived. The way you came, and the news that you bring—those things have consequences, for every person on this island.”

Poison,
I thought. It was just as Zach used to say, back in the village:
You’re poison. Everything you touch is contaminated.